Life After Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption - Hardcover

Hopkins, Evans D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743246233 ISBN 13: 9780743246231

Publisher: Free Press, 2005

Synopsis

Life After Life is the haunting and gloriously redemptive tale of Evans D. Hopkins's many lives, a sweeping journey from promising middle-class youth to civil rights militant, from criminal and convict to celebrated writer and enlightened man.
Evans D. Hopkins was born during the Jim Crow era in a second-rate, segregated hospital, and educated in segregated primary schools in Danville, Virginia, a town that proudly proclaimed itself the "Last Capital of the Confederacy." With parents who stressed the value of education, as a teenager he was in the forefront of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, he fell in love with the traditionally white man's game of tennis, modeling himself after his idol, the legendary Arthur Ashe, only to be swept off the courts by the Black Panther Party at the age of sixteen.
Just out of high school, Hopkins moved to Panther headquarters in Oakland, California, where he spent two years writing for the Party newspaper, covering the trial of the San Quentin Six, working with Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and taking part in their move into politics when Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. He became historian for the group, documenting the years when altercations with authorities resulted in the deaths of numerous Panthers. And he was witness to the internal strife within the Party that led to the group's decline and his own decision to leave in the fall of 1974.
When he returned to Danville, Hopkins was a different man, disillusioned and filled with rage and a legacy of militancy. He was, in his own words, "the quintessential angry young black man." Convicted of armed robbery and given a life sentence, Hopkins would spend twenty of the next twenty-two years in the prisons of Virginia. Inside, fighting despair and isolation and dreaming of escape, Hopkins sought salvation in the written word, writing in his cell in the early morning hours to escape the noise of the prison. Focusing on issues of social and criminal injustice, Hopkins would begin reaching a national audience when his inside account of an execution, "Who's Afraid of Virginia's Chair," was published in The Washington Post.
Paroled in 1997, Hopkins returned home, a free man at last, but facing the overwhelming challenges of caring for his aging parents and daily life in a world that was new after so many years of incarceration.
In this stunning look back at a man's struggle with himself and the world around him, Life After Life is also about the influences that sustained Hopkins's development despite overwhelming odds, influences that allowed him to emerge from two decades of imprisonment an uncorrupted man, still able to give to his family and community. Finally, Life After Life is a searingly honest view of events in America in the second half of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of a child, a militant, a prisoner, and, most important, a writer.

About this title

About the Author

Evans D. Hopkins grew up in Danville, Virginia, and divides his time between there and Richmond, Virginia, where he worksas a freelance writer. His pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Slate, Nerve.com, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, In These Times, and Southern Exposure, among others. His writing has been anthologized in several volumes, including the Prentice Hall Reader, Graywolf Press's The Private I, and The Best of Nerve.com. Life After Life is his first full-length book.

From the Inside Flap

"Life After Life is a wonderful autobiography and a touching and enlightening story. Evans Hopkins' writing is vivid and compelling, specifically the passages about his attempted escapes, the atrocities of prison, and his discovery of the love he has for humanity even though it is often unlovable. His honesty about his own culpability rings through clearly and courageously." --Sandra Brown

"Life After Life is a low-keyed but compelling account of the Black Panther Party s impact, both positive and negative, on a young, southern, black man s journey to completeness in racist America. Evans D. Hopkins has bared his soul to help us understand why thousands like him took up the extreme challenge, and are better for it." --David Graham Du Bois, President & CEO, The W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation, Inc.

"Evans D. Hopkins reminds us of what happens to a dream deferred in this powerful story of a youth almost destroyed by his anger at a society that at best ignores a black man and at worst finds new ways to lynch him. What makes this book remarkable is the journey to redemption, the story of how the lost youth finds himself in the silence of a prison cell and continues to grow as a human today. We should all rejoice!" Patrice Gaines, author of Laughing In The Dark

"Life After Life is the story of the search for identity, one man's struggle to create a more just world, the descent into inexplicable rebellion and crime, and the ways in which prison can set a person free. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and, in the end, inspiring book." --Marita Golden, author of Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex

Reviews

Since Hopkins was one of 11 children who first integrated a Danville Virginia high school, one might expect his memoir to expound on tales of racial struggle and, perhaps, to reflect on a small Southern city's modernization. Although there are a few examples of such struggles in Hopkins's account of his experiences as a young African-American man, what stands out most in this memoir are his intelligent, informative descriptions of his transformation into an active member of the Black Panther party and his transition to doing hard time in the Virginia penal system. Though his tone can often be a bit too detached and cold, his book offers a rare glimpse into the difficult and fascinating training of Black Panther Party members. Fans of the articles that he published in the New Yorker and the Washington Post while he was still in prison will definitely want to pick up this book.
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Straining against his middle-class background and his growing outrage over racial injustice, Hopkins became involved with the Black Panthers at an early age. His writing talent earned him high visibility as he traveled to Oakland in the 1960s and began writing for the Panther newspaper. But he becomes disillusioned by firsthand experience and stories of cruelty and mistreatment as well as drug abuse by leaders. Back home in Virginia, he fathers a son and drifts into a life of crime, committing armed robberies that eventually earn him a life sentence. In prison, he hones his writing skills as a means of self-expression, mounting a crusade against the death penalty and wrongful convictions. After serving 16 years, he is paroled and must cope with the loss of his son while he was imprisoned and the challenges of making a new life for himself as a writer. This fascinating memoir of prison issues and personal redemption is reminiscent of Makes Me Want to Holler (1994), by Nathan McCall, whom Hopkins knew in prison. Vanessa Bush
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Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743246233
• ISBN 13: 9780743246231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304